WIRELESS NETWORKING

Digital wireless communication is not a new idea. Modern digital wireless systems have better performance To a first approximation, wireless networks can be divided into three main categories: 1. System interconnection. 2. Wireless LANs.

3. Wireless WANs.

System interconnection :
System interconnection is all about interconnecting the components of a computer using short-range radio signals. Almost every computer has a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and printer connected to the main unit by cables

Consequently, some companies got together to design a short-range wireless network called Bluetooth to connect these components without wires. Bluetooth also allows digital cameras, headsets, scanners, and other devices to connect to a computer by merely being brought within range. No cables, no driver installation, just put them down, turn them on, and they work. For many people, this is easy to operate devices.
In the simplest form, system interconnection networks use the master-slave paradigm The system unit is normally the master, talking to the mouse, keyboard, etc., as slaves. The master tells the slaves what addresses to use, when they can broadcast, how long they can transmit, what frequencies they can use so on

(a) Bluetooth configuration.

(b) Wireless LAN.

Wireless LANs:
These are systems in which every computer has a radio modem and antenna with which it can communicate with other systems. If the systems are close enough, they can communicate directly with one another in a peer-to-peer configuration. Wireless LANs are becoming increasingly common in small offices and homes, where installing Ethernet is considered too much trouble, as well as in older office buildings, company cafeterias, conference rooms, and other places(ex:-Wi-Fi).

There is a standard for wireless LANs, called IEEE 802.11, which most systems implement and which is becoming very widespread.
Wireless WANs: The third kind of wireless network is used in wide area systems. The radio network used for cellular telephones is an example of a low-bandwidth wireless system. This system has already gone through three generations. The first generation was analog and for voice only. The second generation was digital and for voice only. The third generation is digital and is for both voice and data. In a certain sense, cellular wireless networks are like wireless LANs, except that the distances involved are much greater and the bit rates much lower (ex:-Wi-Max)

Bluetooth:
In 1994, the L. M. Ericsson company became interested in connecting its mobile phones to other devices (e.g., PDAs) without cables. Together with four other companies (IBM, Intel, Nokia, and Toshiba), it formed a SIG (Special Interest Group, i.e., consortium) to develop a wireless standard for interconnecting computing and communication devices and accessories using short-range, low-power, inexpensive wireless radios. The project was named Bluetooth, after Harald Blaatand (Bluetooth) II (940-981)

Bluetooth Architecture:
The basic unit of a Bluetooth system is a piconet, which consists of a master node and up to seven active slave nodes within a distance of 10 meters. Multiple piconets can exist in the same (large) room and can even be connected via a bridge node An interconnected collection of piconets is called a scatternet

Two piconets can be connected to form a scatternet.

In addition to the seven active slave nodes in a piconet, there can be up to 255 parked nodes in the net. These are devices that the master has switched to a low-power state to reduce the drain on their batteries. In parked state, a device cannot do anything except respond to an activation or beacon signal from the master. There are also two intermediate power states, hold and sniff The reason for the master/slave design is that the designers intended to facilitate the implementation of complete Bluetooth chips for under $5. The consequence of this decision is that the slaves are fairly dumb, basically just doing whatever the master tells them to do. At its heart, a piconet is a centralized TDM system, with the master controlling the clock and determining which device gets to communicate in which time slot. All communication is between the master and a slave; direct slave-slave communication is not possible.

Bluetooth Applications:
There are13 specific applications to be supported and provides different protocol stacks for each one. The 13 applications, which are called profiles

The Bluetooth profiles.

The Bluetooth Frame Structure : There are several frame formats, the most important of which It begins with an access code that usually identifies the master so that slaves within radio range of two masters can tell which traffic is for them. Next comes a 54-bit header containing typical MAC sub layer fields. Then comes the data field, of up to 2744 bits (for a five-slot transmission). For a single time slot, the format is the same except that the data field is 240 bits.

A typical Bluetooth data frame

Let us take a quick look at the header. The Address field identifies which of the eight active devices the frame is intended for. The Type field identifies the frame type (ACL, SCO, poll, or null), the type of error correction used in the data field, and how many slots long the frame is. The Flow bit is asserted by a slave when its buffer is full and cannot receive any more data. This is a primitive form of flow control.

The Acknowledgement bit is used to piggyback an ACK onto a frame.

The Sequence bit is used to number the frames to detect retransmissions. The protocol is stop-and-wait, so 1 bit is enough. Then comes the 8-bit header Checksum. The entire 18-bit header is repeated three times to form the 54-bit header

the receiving side, a simple circuit examines all three copies of each bit. If all three are the same, the bit is accepted. If not, the majority opinion wins. Thus, 54 bits of transmission capacity are used to send 10 bits of header. The reason is that to reliably send data in a noisy environment using cheap, low-powered (2.5 mW) devices with little computing capacity, a great deal of redundancy is needed. Various

Bridging:
Having seen why bridges are needed

Host A on a wireless (802.11) LAN has a packet to send to a fixed host, B, on an (802.3) Ethernet to which the wireless LAN is connected. The packet descends into the LLC sublayer and acquires an LLC header (shown in black in the figure). Then it passes into the MAC sublayer and an 802.11 header is prepended to it (also a trailer, not shown in the figure). This unit goes out over the air and is picked up by the base station, which sees that it needs to go to the fixed Ethernet. When it hits the bridge connecting the 802.11 network to the 802.3 network, it starts in the physical layer and works its way upward. In the MAC sublayer in the bridge, the 802.11 header is stripped off. The bare packet (with LLC header) is then handed off to the LLC sublayer in the bridge

Operation of a LAN bridge from 802.11 to 802.3.

Spanning Tree Bridges : To increase reliability, some sites use two or more bridges in parallel between pairs of LANs

A simple example of these problems can be seen by observing how a frame, F, with unknown destination is handled in .Each bridge, following the normal rules for handling unknown destinations, uses flooding, which in this example just means copying it to LAN 2. Shortly thereafter, bridge 1 sees F2, a frame with an unknown destination, which it copies to LAN 1, generating F3 (not shown). Similarly, bridge 2 copies F1 to LAN 1 generating F4 (also not shown). Bridge 1 now forwards F4 and bridge 2 copies F3. This cycle goes on forever .
(a) Interconnected LANs. (b) A spanning tree covering the LANs. The dotted lines are not part of the spanning tree.

To build the spanning tree, first the bridges have to choose one bridge to be the root of the tree. They make this choice by having each one broadcast its serial number, installed by the manufacturer and guaranteed to be unique worldwide. The bridge with the lowest serial number becomes the root. Next, a tree of shortest paths from the root to every bridge and LAN is constructed. This tree is the spanning tree. If a bridge or LAN fails, a new one is computed. The result of this algorithm is that a unique path is established from every LAN to the root and thus to every other LAN. Although the tree spans all the LANs, not all the bridges are necessarily present in the tree (to prevent loops). Even after the spanning tree has been established, the algorithm continues to run during normal operation in order to automatically detect topology changes and update the tree

Remote Bridges:
A common use of bridges is to connect two (or more) distant LANs. For example, a company might have plants in several cities, each with its own LAN. Ideally, all the LANs should be interconnected, so the complete system acts like one large LAN. This goal can be achieved by putting a bridge on each LAN and connecting the bridges pairwise with point-to-point lines (e.g., lines leased from a telephone company). A simple system, with three LANs .

The usual routing algorithms apply here. The simplest way to see this is to regard the three point-to-point lines as hostless LANs. Then we have a normal system of six LANS interconnected by four bridges. Nothing in what we have studied so far says that a LAN must have hosts on it. Remote bridges can be used to interconnect distant LANs

Various protocols can be used on the point-to-point lines. One possibility is to choose some standard point-to-point data link protocol such as PPP, putting complete MAC frames in the payload field. This strategy works best if all the LANs are identical, and the only problem is getting frames to the correct LAN. Another option is to strip off the MAC header and trailer at the source bridge and put what is left in the payload field of the point-to-point protocol. A new MAC header and trailer can then be generated at the destination bridge. A disadvantage of this approach is that the checksum that arrives at the destination host is not the one computed by the source host, so errors caused by bad bits in a bridge's memory may not be detected.
Routers A router is a box (usually a regular computer) with (at least) two ports, used to connect also dissimilar networks. It differs from bridges since it operates at the network level. [It will also use different addresses. For example a bridge may use Ethernet addresses while a router uses IP addresses.] It does all the transformations that may be required by the transfer of packets across the networks it connects. Routing involves two basic activities: running routing algorithms to determine routes, as expresed by routing tables, and using the routing tables to move packets across the network. The latter activity is easier and it is called switching.

Routing tables contain information that will indicate for each packet on the basis of its final destination (usually an IP address) where to go next (next-hop forwarding) as to the port to be used and the physical address of the next router. Cycles can exist in the graph that has routers as nodes and ports as edges. The routing tables are built to work well also in the presence of cycles. It is important that routing tables be not too large.
Evaluation of Routing Algorithms: Route quality (optimality): network utilization, path length, delay, bandwidth, communication cost, reliability. Overhead (simplicity): control messages, processing, state (i.e. memory required). Speed of convergence to best routes . Robustness: Responsiveness to topology changes.

Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi was developed to be used for mobile computing devices, such as laptops, in LANs, but is now increasingly used for more applications.
Including Internet and VoIP phone access Gaming Basic connectivity of consumer electronics such as televisions and DVD players, or digital cameras. There are even more standards in development that will allow Wi-Fi to be used by cars in highways in support of an Intelligent Transportation System to increase safety, gather statistics, and enable mobile commerce IEEE 802.11p

WiMAX, More Than Internet?

WiMAX is a term coined to describe standard, interoperable implementations of IEEE 802.16 wireless networks, in a rather similar way to Wi-Fi being interoperable implementations of the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN standard. However, WiMAX is very different from Wi-Fi in the way it works. WiMAX has the potential to replace a number of existing telecommunications infrastructures. In a fixed wireless configuration it can replace the telephone company's copper wire networks, the cable TV's coaxial cable infrastructure while offering Internet Service Provider (ISP) services. In its mobile variant, WiMAX has the potential to replace cellular networks.

In Conclusion
Wireless technology may seem like the next step in networking, to an extent cannot be used to their full potential due to interference from weather or other phenomena that may alter radio waves. There are many who are refining and developing wireless networking to make it global such as WiMAX, that is also a compliment to Wi-Fi and may help expand Wi-Fis capabilities as well. One can look to the future and see wireless technology as being a competitor in networking because of how quickly many business are trying to take advantage of them. Ex. Bluetooth in cellular technology, in computers, cars, etc. Wi-Fi for schools, WiMAX for entire cities.